Is gaming a driver for networking? I’ve been seeing articles that link multiplayer online gaming with edge computing, gigabit Internet service, augmented reality, and a bunch of other things that people are really interested in. The question is whether the interest would be enough to actually drive incremental networking opportunity, and from that drive infrastructure changes. Maybe even telco revenue? We’ll see.
One thing that makes the topic of multiplayer game opportunity complex is the fuzzy definition of the term. My own view is that there are three models of “online game”. The first model requires the user have an account or sign in for ad sponsorship, and the game logic is still local to the user, meaning in the user’s device. In the second model, the user actually plays a cloud instance via the Internet, and in the third model a community of players inhabit a common game instance, reacting with “stock” elements of the game and also with each other’s avatars.
Estimates of the massively multiplayer game (MMG) market range from around $20 billion to $40 billion, depending on just what models of online gaming are actually included. For purposes of this piece, I’m looking only at the third model, because only concurrent multiplayer gaming really seems to be a credible driver to improved user-to-game connectivity. The number of regular players peaked in 2014 at about 15 million (but it’s difficult to get a good number here because users set up multiple accounts), according to my model, and has been declining very slightly ever sense, to a current level of about 12 million.
All MMGs require that players control a “character” or avatar, and it’s this control path (both to and from the game) that creates any special communications needs. If players move their avatars, the movement must be communicated from player to game, and the result back to all the players who have at that moment the subject avatar in their view. In addition, any non-player avatars or changes in scene have to be communicated visually to any player whose character could “see” or be impacted by them.
Any latency that accumulates in the path from player to game and back will create a delay in the experience, enough of which is disruptive to the immersive quality of the game. If some players have lower latency than others, the latency advantage could give them an opportunity to react to something before their online competitors, in much the same sense as low latency gives high-frequency stock traders an advantage. Similarly, of complex scenes have to be rendered out to each player, the bandwidth of the path would introduce a delay that has the same effect as propagation latency.
How does all of this impact sacred network industry cows like edge computing, augmented reality, or access bandwidth? First, it’s important to note that gamers who like MMGs are typically competitive, and so it’s arguably more important whether someone perceives a technology as giving them an advantage than whether it’s really measurably true. Thus, we need to look at both the “real” and “social” benefits, the bragging rights.
If we visualize an MMG as a single process running somewhere, in a data center with massive resources, then the latency seen by the users will be related to the number of trunks/hops transited along the path to and from that center. Users further from the game would be at a disadvantage. My own experiments with broadband Internet services suggest that hop count has a greater impact on round-trip delay than access speed, as long as the access connection is at least in the range of 25 Mbps. Thus, faster Internet wouldn’t really make up for unfavorable hop-count.
Suppose the MMG system is distributed? Geographic processing centers for the game, perhaps as much as one in each metro area, would reduce latency for all users, and as total latency is reduced, the contribution of the access connection becomes more significant. There is some model indication that in a game centered in a metro area, users running 25 Mbps connections would be at a disadvantage in at least highly changeable scenarios, versus a user with a 1 Gbps connection.
Could we drop the notion of a monolithic, central, game system? That’s complicated because of the notion of “context”. A player’s character/avatar “lives” inside a context, which loosely speaking is the area around the character that represents line of vision/influence. That context might be entirely generated by the game, or it might be shared with other players. These other players could be just passing through, playing an active role, or even being central to the context. In the limiting case, there could be a context for each player, if none at the moment could “see” one another. Even in this case, the game would have to be able to tell whether players had moved so that their context now overlapped.
This framework would have to be fit with edge computing, or any other form of distributed computing. If two characters were to enter combat with each other (or together against game-generated characters) the game could distribute a component to an edge point, providing the two were in the same general geography. The more people you involve in the shared context, the more complex the problem of finding a “good” place to host it.
A context-centric view of gaming could mean that each player had a hosted context, and the player then interacted with it directly. It could be edge-hosted or even hosted on the player’s system or device. This shared context would then exchange context-update information with other contexts that, for the moment, overlapped with the player’s own. Context synchronization could be loose if the players involved were not directly interacting, but would have to be tightened if the players were, for example, engaged in combat with each other.
The player-to-context connection would now be the major source of latency, which means that you could reduce latency by increasing broadband speed. The more intense the player-to-context interaction, including augmented reality, the more broadband speed would matter. In short, there would be a growing practical benefit to “better” broadband and edge computing.
If players interact with their own context, it’s easy to make that context local, meaning that it would admit to the possibility of edge hosting. Connecting context hosts would be required for synchronization, but this would involve edge-to-edge pathways that would certainly not be access connections, and might not even be over the Internet. You could consider this kind of gaming as a cloud computing application, with the interior pathways private to the cloud provider.
Today’s gaming models don’t really optimize distributable, context-centric, game implementations. It seems possible that if a game were designed to be distributed, and in particular designed to be distributed to the edge, the experience of gaming could be improved. It’s also possible that in this situation, edge computing, low latency, and augmented reality could be added to the picture. In other words, gaming could be a credible consumer of edge computing and gigabit broadband, even faster 5G.
That’s not the same as being a credible driver, though. Gaming tends to run in fad cycles, with a game growing in player count as it becomes popular, because it’s different. It loses player count as players move on to other, newer, things. The question is who would be willing to step up and invest in both a distributable gaming architecture and the edge resources to host it. Can you see a network operator presenting a gaming business case to a CFO? “Game them and they will come?” Probably this is the sort of thing that Amazon or Google (who you recall is already diddling with gaming) would have to do.
If some player does do it, though, it starts an avalanche of follow-ups. The nature of MMP gaming, as a socially driven activity, guarantees that once some game offers this approach everyone else would have to follow. So, boldness on anyone’s part might bring about a real near-term benefit…to operators in the form of faster (presumably higher-priced) connections, and to cloud providers in justifying a real-time edge-centric view of the future.
There’s not much difference between a gaming model and a worker point-of-activity model, either. There’s not much difference between a distributed gaming application and a cloud-native distributed, scalable, application either. We are moving toward the software framework of real-time service, with or without gaming. Gaming could, just could, make us move faster.